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Glimpse your genetic future for $1000

By Rowan Hooper

THE year is 2010. You walk into a lab in a shopping mall, pay &dollar;1000 and give a swab of skin cells from your cheek. A few days later you receive an email. It is a string of 3 billion DNA letters that hold the key to your future health.

That personal genome sequencing is within sight is remarkable. The first human genome sequence took &dollar;800 million and 11 years to complete. The “Sanger” method used to do it has changed little since it was developed in the 1970s by Fred Sanger at the University of Cambridge. …